Post-Penguin Anchor Text Case&nbspStudy

This post was promoted from YouMoz. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

It's no secret that Google's Panda and Penguin updates caused a lot of panic. SEOs and marketers were FREAKING out and honestly, I got tired of reading about it - I'm sure most of you did too. Although I'm pretty turned off to information about these updates, I've been really interested in the anchor text issues surrounding the Penguin update. If sites that have over-optimized anchors lost traffic due to the update, it seems to make sense that sites can move up with relatively few (or without any) anchored links. I wanted to test that idea and decided that it was time for a good, old fashioned case study.

Designing the Case Study

Instead of trying to sound cool and acting like I designed a super professional case study, I'll just tell you how it really happened. I simply wanted to know if I could take a brand new domain (with no links obviously), and get it to rank for a decently competitive term, in an oft-spammed niche by getting links (mostly non-exact match keyword anchored) from relevant pages of relevant sites.

Finding the Keyword Phrase

So I wanted to use a semi-difficult keyword phrase that was in a spammy niche. That way the case study would be more conclusive. I looked at a lot of different options for keywords - most of them were in the finance vertical and were based on credit cards, loans, or credit. I decided eventually that I would try to find a credit-related keyword. That way, I wouldn't end up with a ranking for a loan or credit card keyword, without being able to provide the actual loan or credit card the searcher was looking for. Credit keywords, on the other hand, are informational in nature and fit better with the content (which is admittedly ghetto right now) I could produce. The phrase I ended up choosing is '650 credit score'. Using the SEOmoz Pro Keyword Difficulty Tool, the phrase has a keyword difficulty score of 50, which is in the range I wanted. It's difficult enough for a good test but not difficult enough to make getting results impossible. Here's what the phrase looks like:

Setting Up the Site

On August 14, 2012, I set up the site on a brand new domain - Doctor650.com (not going to link from here because I don't want to compromise the case study). I used WordPress as my CMS and wrote six articles about having a credit score in the 650 range. The content is passable but honestly, not amazing. I do know a lot about credit and have improved my own credit score from under 500 to over 800. I was also personally in the 650 range for a while. On top of that I spoke with a loan officer to get information about getting loans with a 650 score. That said, I didn't take 10 hours to write each of the articles. The site design is horrendous (not my strong point).

I'm fully aware that the site is not the 'ultimate resource' on this topic, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if the site had 'Panda' issues at some point. My bounce rate is ridiculously high. The keyword phrase I'm going after is on the home page twice - once at the top in a heading, and once as a label for the comments. I'm not using spammy linking strategy inside the site. All of my articles are linked to from the sidebar but I've used anchors that don't contain the exact phrase, on purpose.

Linking Strategy

I wanted to get relevant links from sites that either were exclusively about credit or credit scores, or already had a lot of information on one of these topics. I wrote guest posts for sites that I found in the Finance category of PostRunner (a guest-posting community/portal that I co-founded) as the source of all of the links, with the exception of one link that I got from making a cheesy video that I posted on YouTube (not my greatest accomplishment). This link is of course no-followed like all links from YouTube. Here are the anchors for the links that I used in the case study, in the order that I got them:

here

Doctor 650

my site

Dissecting The 650 Credit Score

here

Doctor650.com

here

http://www.doctor650.com/ (no-followed link from YouTube)

resource on 650 credit scores

Doctor650.com

clicking here

Doctor650.com

650 credit score

As you can see, I got only one exact-match anchored link but I did get three that contain some version of the phrase.

Results of the Experiment

On Oct 6 - 53 days after I 'launched' the site - the site popped up at #4 in Google for '650 credit score'. It also ranks pretty high for a lot of related terms. It has steadily climbed from where I first saw it (in the 80s) without any major jumps. It's moved a few positions at a time, for the most part. I found it interesting that the site seemed to drop a few positions each time I acquired a new link, and would then come back stronger than ever after a few days. As of today, the site ranks #2 (it's been moving up and down between #2 and #4). Here's the ranking analysis from the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool:

As would be expected, my domain is by far the weakest in the top six, in fact it's the weakest in the top 20. The site only has 13 links and they are from good sites that aren't exceptionally strong.

Probable Conclusions

It's possible to positively influence rankings using significantly few exact match anchored links if they are from highly relevant pages on relevant sites.

It remains possible to rank for fairly difficult phrases quickly with a brand new domain.

Things I Wish I Had Done Differently

I wish I had NOT used the main keyword in any of the links. Now I'm interested in designing a similar case study that doesn't use any exact-match anchored links. My thought process in using one was that this site doesn't have the necessary swag to get some on its own but now I'm wondering where the site would be ranked without that link.

I wish that I had not made the YouTube video. I made it mostly because I wanted to see where the video would rank on its own since I know that I could push traffic from the video to the site. But, it's impossible to measure whether the video is affecting the case study and I wish it wasn't there. I considered deleting it, but wanted to leave it there in the spirit of TAGFEE. It was created and I wanted to disclose that.

The Future Of the Case Study

Right now the case study is in a holding pattern. It's still moving up even though it hasn't had any new links since mid-September (that I'm aware of). It might get to #1 on its own but it might not. If it doesn't move up in the next month or so, I'll get a few more links that aren't anchored with keywords. I'm also interested in expanding the site into a more valuable resource, one that can better stand the test of time. To be honest I'm not sure exactly what the searcher who searches for this phrase wants, so I'm going to have to figure that out. If you have ideas that can help me turn this site into a better resource, I'd love to hear them. You and I both know that it needs help.

About CourtTuttle —
Court Tuttle owns and runs The Keyword Academy, where you can find lots of keyword based, SEO case studies and a unique approach to SEO. Connect with him on Google+ if you think he's one of the cool kids.

Cool experiment Court. I've always appreciated the level of information you've shared over the years on your blog and others. It'd be great to see an update on this in 2-3 months to see if things still hold up.

Hey Bryan, yeah it will definitely be interesting to see how this goes. Anyone who goes to the site will be able to see that it's missing a lot of quality signals hahaha. But, sometimes I just like to see what will happen when I try things out and it's a lot harder to isolate variables on sites that already have history.Good to hear from you, let's grab lunch again sometime.

Thanks for this study. I think it gives us some indications and maybe some people will pick up this idea and do a broader case study with more sites and variations. But anyhow - thanks for reminder not to use to many anchor links or maybe even none. It is the bloody old routine that makes me put them in. I have to control myself not to do it anymore.

Hey Michael I've heard a lot of good things about ya.... Can you look at my site???

Don't take long but what should I work on or add or take away to rank for NEW ORLEANS WEDDING VENUES " ???? I'll take all the ADVICE I CAN GET.... http://albanyplantation.com/a-new-orleans-wedding-venue/

Great one Court. I would really like to appreciate you because of your patience and the competitive niche you have chosen for the experiment. Would really like to see the outcome of an experiment where in an article is spun several times and each variation is posted on the site as different articles, also by building high quality links with no exact match anchor text from strong and relevant niche specific sites. Thanks in advance Court :)

***Update On The Case Study***Most people probably won't find this but for those who do, this morning I was able to get the only exact-match anchored link I used in this case study changed to be a non-anchored link. (It's now generic: click here style).

So right now, the site has exactly 0 exact-match anchored links. I'm expecting a slide but it will be interesting to see how far it slides.

I'm going to let it sit for two weeks as is, and then I'm going to remove the link from YouTube.

"Yep - relevance is the key issue. It doesn't work if the links are from sites that aren't relevant"In your opinion, does the site have to be relevant or the content on the page have to be relevant. For example, if you posted on a non finance blog but the post was all about credit rating, would that have negative, positive or minimal impact in your opinion. Great experiment btw, well thought out and executed!

That's a really good question. Google is a relevancy engine and I think that it's a tiered system with a lot of tiers. There are a lot of other factors at play so it isn't super simple, but here goes.

So here's how I think it works in these situations.

Situation #1: The site itself is relevant, and the content on the page is relevant.

This is kind of the ideal situation because it's complete relevance. Now there are of course other issues at play such as the strength of the sites, but that's another issue. Since we're talking about relevance, this is the ideal.

Situation #2: The site is not as relevant, but the content on the linking page is relevant.

Google's relevancy engine is going to see this in a completely different way - this isn't the ideal. That said, it can still be very beneficial. The problem in this situation is that when you're getting links this way, you are increasing your risk. Things can start to look more unnatural. It's a lot harder to get links that match the first situation and that makes them a lot safer.

Don't get me wrong, situation #2 can happen naturally - in a big way.

For example, I run a blog where I help bloggers to learn SEO. It's really starting to catch on. I just released an e-book for creative bloggers (DIY, Food, Style, Photo, Art, etc.). Most of the people in my audience are creative women and as it turns out, they love to share things. I'm seeing link after link come in from these bloggers who are really excited about the e-book. They are linking from their DIY blogs, food blogs, etc. But, they talk about SEO on the page they are linking from because they're creating an entire post about it. It fits situation #2 perfectly.

This is beneficial to me because it gets my e-book in front of a lot more people. But, it probably increases my risk somewhat. Fortunately for me, my site has plenty of quality signals and the links are truly 100% natural so I can handle that risk. I have a lot of real social sharing that's coinciding with those links. Plus, if those links ever get looked at they will pass with flying colors. Each of them is a true, natural endorsement for me.

If I tried to handle the same number of links from non-relevant sites without all of those quality signals, things could get dicey. The more Google tightens up its filters, the higher my risk and that's the reason I got all of the links by situation #1 - they are all from relevant pages of relevant sites.

This site doesn't have the chops to handle anything less and may not be able to handle even this because of its lack of quality signals.

I see nothing wrong really with situation # 2. It's like an article or video that goes viral. Or a news article, blog post, or press release that takes off and is on news sites, article sites, etc.

The primary concern in linkbuilding, from my perspective, is relevance (whether the site #1 here or content, #2 here) and authority.

If you're linking/ getting links from terribly built sites, with scramled content, no authority, and no real relevant content with a anchor pointing back to your site, then yes, that's a HUGE problem and what I believe what hurt tons of Blog Networks (among other things).

You could even have good, relevant content on/from terribly built sites, with scramled content, no authority and I'd say that wouldn't be a good strategy either (though it still works).

But if you have an decent authority site, that happens to let you "guest post" or hosts a relevant piece of content and links to your site, I find that fine and effective as long as it is coupled with #1 and tons of Social, Video, Content creation, etc.

Really, at the end of the day, silo'ing out SEO without factoring in Social, User Experience/Design, PPC, etc in a holistic approach is tough and really, an ineffective long term strategy. Ask me how I know. :-)

Talking about situation #2 is one of my favorite topics. I agree 100% with the statement that there isn't anything wrong with this situation if you're getting a bunch of links from news sites.

There are a lot of different levels for every strategy you could use and the level at which you use them is going to determine the effectiveness and risk of the strategy. Let's be honest, there are a lot of SEOs that do most of their work between 'terribly built sites' as you put it and 'decent authority sites'.

I've seen this eventually be a problem if they are only doing situation #2. If they are getting links from huge authority sites it obviously isn't really a problem. But, if they are getting those then they are going to get a bunch of natural links from situation #1 so Google can consider that. If they aren't there, the algorithm will probably try to determine why.

No one is saying don't use social. This is just a test and isn't meant to be an example of everything done right.

I liked this case study and the post Court. I have seen similar results from a niche site that I founded last January. The period from January to June of 2012 was such a transitional time in SEO that you can see a virtual history of SEO tactics on the site that some might find humorous. Still, I reached as high as #2 in Google for my #1 targeted keyword and am now a solid #4, but moving up and down occasionally.One of the most frustrating things is still being beaten out by a spammy EMD and another domain (the parent company of the spammy EMD) that both have literally millions of dubious links. Yes, you are right. It is still possible to rank, and rank well, with a brand new domain. What amazes me is that you did it with a topic with which you aren't intimately familiar. To me that says there is still huge opportunity out there and all anyone needs to do is work a bit at it.Regardin ugly sites, at this point I almost think that Google has something in their algorithm that gives bonus points to ugly sites, but I think that's a separate case study :-)Dana

Hahaha Dana I should be the one to test the ugly site theory because I am world class at creating ugly sites.Yeah, you're right - I'm not intimately familiar with this subject but it definitely helped that I personally went through the process of improving my credit score from 500 to 800. I kind of understand the mental hoops you have to jump through. There's no question that someone in the industry could do a much better job at every level. It would definitely be a lot easier for them to write high quality guest posts within a shorter time frame.I'm with you 100% on this: there is still a LOT of opportunity out there. Just have to work for it.

Dear Court, It is not the matter of ugliness. The site is too simple. Simply loading like Google. As Google try to promote quickly loading sites and pages, you may got more marks for that than its color full design appeals. (No marks will get for beautifully designed sites when watching through text browsers)

Court, thank you for providing the case study. There has been a lot of talk lately about branded anchor text, "naked" links, generic links, etc. I think this experiment helps validate the importance of getting relevant links to your website. I personally feel anchor'd links are dead completely.

IMO Relevance is half of it : ) What if a site is not relevant at all but extremely authoritative? If the site is trusted the link will help. .edu .gov site's might not have anything about your vertical on any of their pages, that link will still help.

I'm saying that relevance is the key issue of THIS case study. I could have been more clear by saying that it doesn't work if the links are from sites at a similar level of authority that aren't relevant, it wouldn't work as well.

I would really like to see something similar done with the type of links you're talking about. That would be really interesting. Maybe someone should do it...

Yes, This would make an excellent case study. But the reality is there are many factors involved in each experiment, and what works on one niche might not work on another. Google is looking at over 200 factors : )

Case studies like this are awesome, they are inspiring and help create lots of ideas. However, this particular vertical may have been tarnished by spammers who have been penalized before. The site in the experiment has always had a cleaner natural linking progression. Which gave it more trust/credibility. IMO without a full SEO Audit it's always going to be hard to determine exactly why a site is ranking.

Exact anchor is not dead... pre-penguin you could have 80% of your anchor be exact and rank for the best terms...post-penguin you still need to have anchor.. but i believe its around 5% at most.. so if you're sitting on top of 1,000 links, you can afford 10 or 20 exact matches and trust me.. you will see a difference in the rankings.The problem now is getting those 1,000 quality links.

Hello Court thanks for the nice case study. I have a question for you. I would like to ask if you have used your keyword next to your the anchor texts and how many times did you use it inside the text.

Ooo good question Lakiscy. I had to go back through my spreadsheet to even know the answer. I only mentioned the keyword in the same paragraph that the link appears in once. But the guest posts were highly relevant. One of them had the keyword in the title of the guest post itself. Another one had 650 in the title. All but one of them talks about that score somewhere in the article itself. Hopefully that helps!

Thanks for the great article, Court. Always love reading a good case study.I would guess the vast majority people searching for the 650 credit score just found out that ~650 was their credit score and a) Are wondering if it is good or bad, or b) Want to know if they can qualify for a mortgage/car loan with it.

I think it's difficult to make any solid conclusions simply because your site is the only one that contains the '650' term as part of the domain name. It would be interesting to repeat the same process on a domain that doesn't contain any of the keywords you want to rank for.

Hey Modesto, yeah that probably helps out to a certain degree, I agree with you on that. At the same time, there are a ton of sites in the top 100 that have 'credit' in their domains. Since I don't, that places Doctor 650 at a competitive disadvantage.You're right, the experiment would be more pure though if I had used DoctorBob.com or something similar.

Sure. But your leading term is "650", not credit.It's like prioritizing the Keywords in the Title of a page. I've seen advantages to that having something like:650 Credit Score | How to get a 650 Credit Score | Doctor 650

Vs

Doctor 650 | 650 Credit Score | How to get a 650 Credit Score Similar, sure. But better prioritized to the relevancy of the page. (Note: This is just an example, I'm not saying this is how on-page titles should be optimized, especially with the repetitive nature of the keywords used above)

Dear Court, really great value you shared here. I do accept your efforts and time spending case study. So day by day we learns new things from experts like you. Lot of thanks for doing and presenting it here. I checked the Doctor650 website. Really amazed to the hike in month of September to October as 3 -100s. Hope the links got from You tube and other web pages like

have done a great plus points for the website

In my experience also those new projects very less optimized with anchor tags and used good quality fresh content achieved good improvements and results.

Here in the case of doctor650, there are many plus points as it is in wordpress platform.

Do you have any other seo case study conducted with ordinary pages (other than wp and cms) ?

Anyway thanks for this post with great case study info. Because doing advice and theory class are very easy, and it is really tough to everybody when coming to practical side. So you have done a great job. Hope you will share some case study on EMD updations. Whether it affected not not? I think there is nothing happened by EMD. Because many giant sites law.com, lawyer.com. legalzoom (marketing networks, affiliates marketer ) etc are still there than websites of Law firms with direct legal services (eg. baker and mckenzie ).

Hey Brahmadas,Thanks for your comment. Most of those links, however, aren't the actual guest posts that I did. They are just the rehash that the web tends to naturally produce.

Honestly, being on WordPress doesn't do that much for you. Someone could reproduce the case study without being on a CMS. It's not like it would rank #50 as static HTML when it ranks #2 as a WordPress site.

There's no doubt that the EMD updates took away some of the old value that was there for EMDs. I have a lot of buddies who had lots of EMDs and many of them slid in the rankings. But, I still think that they are better off than they would be with other domains - they just don't rank as highly as they did before if that makes sense. I actually think that EMDs used to be a huge loophole in Google. It was amazing how easily they would rank. Google gave way too much of a bonus for that in the past. I was happy to see them take some of that away.

Wow. Maybe you can do the same for my online e-commerce store. :) I'm new to this SEO stuff and I find it difficult to find "links" everyone says "You need more links!" but where the freak do I get those!? I am in a highly competitive marketing (crib bedding) and big department stores don't help. I just signed up for SEOMOZ 15 minutes ago and I'm trying hard to get my site to rank up there with the rest of the big boys.

Welcome to the world of SEO. :) Get in touch with me if you have any questions, I'd love to help you out however I can. I've found that I can compete well with big companies by picking longer-tail keywords - the super specific keywords. It would be much easier to compete for 'yellow bumblebee crib bedding' than it would be to compete for 'crib bedding'. You'll find your way! Get in touch with me if you have questions - my contact info is on my profile.

Just remember--you need more QUALITY LINKS, not just more links in general. It's an easy trap to fall into if you aren't careful and if you fall too far it can be pretty hard to climb your way back out. And remember to be patient! The "big boys" have been at this for a long time so don't get discouraged if your site isn't blowing everyone away in a few short weeks. Some of the best advice you can get is here on SEOMoz so keep checking back for the latest blog posts and you won't be steered wrong.

- "semi-competitive"- How do you determine this? Is there a scale you use? Something like MarketSamurai to determine difficulty? Intitle? PPC competition? Exact search amount? Moz's indicators? How many links the competitors have for the term that are in the Top 10? This is vital. Why? Because an intitle of 5,030-ish which "650 credit score" is not what I would consider "semi competitive". I'd put that on the lower tier of competitiveness somewhere between Low and Medium.

This may be semantics but is vital when displaying the effectiveness of a strategy. Here are some items I've asked and how I'd clarify them:

- Intitle- As I've stated the intitle is a mere 5k-ish. Somewhere between med-low comp.

- PPC Comp- Generally, a term that has PPC competition also makes it a SEO priority and thus more competitive. Well, "650 credit score" doesn't really have any competitors/advertisers for PPC thus making the term, most likely, not a top SEO priority either. Meaning, the SEO comp is low.

- Search Amount- 880 exact locals. Not really a top tier or "semi-competitive term". Again, maybe I look at things differently, but taking in the 2 previous points and the fact this get searched less than 30 times a day, makes me think it really has no real significance.

- Moz/Ahrefs, Content/Word count etc- I use other linkbuilding research tools to see how the competitors are ranking. It would also be nice to round out how you see competitors ranking for the same term. Thus, comparing the amount of content and linkbuilding going on by your comp vs your strategy.

Sorry, if this seems like I'm hounding/grilling you, but I see far too often case studies stating results when the foundation of the case study is off, much less how it is tested/implemented.

I'd love to get your feedback.

(NOTE: Also, this would also be more conclusive if you compared it to another site that you built with the same quality of site build and content and did "grey hat" SEO on it with high % anchors as a comparison, thus rounding out whether non-keyword anchors with good/decent content with relevant links actually beats "grey hat seo".)

The original article talks about the metrics used to determine competition and let's get this out of the way right now - I don't think this is a competitive term.

Sorry Chris - 'top tier' and 'semi-competitive' isn't even close to the same thing.

Ha. So you think that the foundation of the case study is off because the term is only searched for 880 times per month? Sorry dude - that makes no sense at all.

So to sum up what you're saying: Case studies are only valid if you use competitive phrases.

Here's how case studies work. You try things out and you show movement. You are transparent about what's in the case study. Dude, no one is trying to say that you could use this many links and move to #2 for a super competitive term. The point of the study is to show that you can MOVE with this type of link.

Houding doesn't bother me Chris, I have thick skin. But, you have the perfect approach stuck in your head and case studies require isolation.

Though I do agree with Chris that two sites would have been a cool factor in this case study; the idea is to see if there was any correlation. The idea behind ANY study is to SEE WHAT HAPPENS. There is no right or wrong answer. If your study had shown that there is no correlation to ranking with non exact match keyword it would still have been useful. Case studies are about information and not definitive answers. Two sites would have been cool to compare but it's not needed in this scenario because the study was simply meant to see if it was possible, not if it does better.

I love the case study, I wonder what the impact would be if you suddenly, or over a period of a couple of months picked up links from domains from little relevance. Would this have a negative effect because of dilution? Or even a positive effect. What do you think?

Very interesting study! Am quite impressed with the relative speed with which you moved up the rankings. Have you by any chance done a similar experiment - wherein you might have considered the result - not satisfactory. Which in turn might have led you to make tweaks and embark on this particular one. If so, it would be useful to know what didn't work.Hats off to the effort!

Hey Richa! Yeah, I've actually done a few different experiments where the results weren's satisfactory. Before Penguin, I did a few similar case studies where more of the links were anchored with exact-match keyword links. It worked great back then. Now, it doesn't work anymore in fact, it seems to make things worse. Too many anchored links kills the progress and this led me to want to try a case study like the one in this article.I have also done case studies using links from weaker sources, like article directories. I did one in September and initially I saw good results. The case study moved up in the rankings (amazingly). But, it stalled out and after that, I had a hard time making the rankings move even when I got high quality, relevant, anchored links. There seemed to be a stalling effect that happened because of the low quality links. I think that at some point, this could be overcome but honestly it's easier to just never get the weaker links in the first place.

And when I do back link analysis of websites which are top 10 on Google maximum
sites are using SEO India as anchor text for eternal back links.

My question is very simple, if the case study is saying that we don't have to
use same anchor text which is our targeted keyword, then why these websites are
getting rank even all are using the same anchor text. I have seen same case in keyword
which is “Web development company”.

So, I believe that getting links from different resources
will work and it should be look like natural even anchor text is our targeted
keywords. Or getting links from high traffic generations sites will boost your
rankings not matter what anchor text we use it could be our targeted keywords.

http://www.seroundtable.com>> this website providing paid links, here many are getting links
with targeted keywords and ranking well on Google.

And Search Engine Roundtable has talked several times about their Toolbar PageRank drop and traffic drop for selling those links. http://www.seroundtable.com/sponsored-links-12978.html is one such example.

The case study doesn't examine whether sites can still rank with a high percentage of exact-match anchored links. It just shows that you don't have to, if that makes sense.

I still see plenty of sites that rank highly with a high percentage of anchored links but based on what I've seen, that's getting dicier and dicier all the time. So, I wanted to test an alternative.

To show in a case study that a site can still rank well with all exact match anchored links, you would have to start a new site, add all anchored links and then wait to see what happens. You can really look at other sites that could have a bunch of other quality signals. You have to try to isolate as best as you can.

It's smart of you to look at what other people are doing. But, if you can't reproduce their results then you know that you're missing something and you have to try to figure out what that is!

I agree with you so I want to try to find out the reasons why the people are doing well on Google and what I am missing which I wanted to learn?

Today is a big day for our company we are top 5 with “SEO India” in USA Search. We have followed below activities.

1) We removed bad links2) a) Content Informative: 1) News Related2) Related Search 3) Relevant 4) we use http://ubersuggest.org/ and http://soolve.com it helps us lots.b) We build brands through social media workc) We monitor Google Analytics/Webmastere) We are working on rich snippetsf) We create a profile and stopped work on directories submissions and other useless stuffg) We share our videos/Pdf/PPTCompetition back link analysis: He get 2-3 primary keywords in this account and do competition analysis. We have got top 30 sites list as per the ranking of keywords and then mentioned on excel sheet for back link analysis. This practice repeating in every 15 days. So that we can track what sites are improving or dropping in ranking with their work. And do the back link analysis find out the link building patters for new sites which newly come up and also review for old site work patents which have been dropped.h) We do the Guest Posti) We worked on artilce prismj) Content Citationk) Promoting Content through SMO very genuinelyL) We do blog Commenting very genuinelyM) We work on Google+N) We do social bookmarking on the top sites for our blogsThese are the majority of the things on which we followed and get the rankings.So for me getting back links from various channels which should be based on user experience will work no matter what anchor text you use?Sometimes I feel that many things which I read any on blog or forum is not the reality for SEOing. It portrays a better trend at a glance and seems misleading. Which helps to sell marketing tools to the people or they want to popularize himself /herself through these platforms.But again thx lots for your case study, you have done a good job here and give us a way how our website will not affect by penguin updates

I suppose what it comes down to is; is it natural, or is it manipulated in some way? Google and the other search engines are supposedly chasing what the user wants, and with their seemingly infinite amount of data are able to model "natural" behaviour quite nicely. 90% of anchors for any keyword, even your own brand name, is pretty dodgy.

A very nice case study Court! But I guess, what brings to your website on the top 2 spot on Google is actually, your content. I found out that your content is of high quality because it is informative and original as well. And we all know that Google loves content right? especially, if it is unique and interesting. And also, you didn't over optimize your content with a lot of targeted keywords. But, even if you have a small amount of backlinks to your website, as long as your content \is unique, you should expect that the Google rankings will go up on top. Because I already experienced this before, even though the page has no backlinks yet but it went to number 12 in just a couple of days for the specific keyword.

Ranking for a semi-competitive term with little-to-no exact anchor links using a highly relevant domain and content? That's just absurd. Surely it's impossible to rank for something like "650 Credit Score" or even something really crazy like "SEO is dead" without massive amounts of directory, comment, and article links using precisely 30% exact anchor links. This is especially true if you haven't paid some "SEO expert" thousands of dollars for their services. I'm calling shenanigans.

In light of Simon's recent post regarding Semantic Web and Link Building Without Links, I'd be intrigued to hear whether the mention of doctor650.com in this post, in a semi-relevant context (you have mentioned finance and credit scores a few times) has any impact on rankings..

I have a site that has experienced ranking improvements with no new inbound links.. however it has had mentions in other on-topic locations.

Yeah sebby I actually wondered the same thing! After the post went live on YouMoz, I kept checking to see if it would move up to #1. If it had, it might be a bit of evidence leaning in that direction. It didn't move, but that doesn't mean that it didn't provide benefit.

I really want to see someone prove that correlation and it's super interesting to hear about your site. I'd love to hear more about it.

Interesting Case Study. I agree with your findings and think anchor text will become more and more devalued as time goes on. I tend to see good results whenever quality content is produced and backlinks are coming from quality relevant websites that would have a legitimate reason to link back to your website as a resource.

Yep I agree 100%. Anchors are going to matter less and less and are already getting dangerous to use. I'm seeing that the more keyword anchors you use, the higher your risk becomes. Fortunately I have seen people recover when they got themselves in trouble with too many anchored links.

I find case studies are the golden proof for many of the techniques we blabber about on SEO blogs, which is why it's always so refreshing to see new ones! This encourages me to try out a few studies of my own and see what I can learn and how I can apply it to other sites!

I will definitely do that. I should have those results in a few weeks. I've been waiting for SEOmoz to move the study to the main blog and now I want to make sure everyone has a chance to see it. But, after that I'm stoked to expand the study.

Court, really well done article and seo theory work. I did wonder about the video when I first saw it there. So much mystery about the seo value of videos with keywords, especially since YouTube is a Google product.

I think it's important to add into the conversation that exact keyword URL names matter a lot more since Penguin.

I was working with a Denver client in 'landscaping' and a newer competitor's website with only 5 non-special links to it was on top in #1 for the search: "Denver lawn services". (They have a full site now.) The URL (www.DenverLawnServices.com) with the matching keywords, "lawn" and "service" were clearly making a large direct impact on positive rankings.

Anyone else seen this trend still happening?

Looking forward to your next case without video and non-anchor links. Cheers.

That's interesting SEMWarrior. I wonder how that's playing with the EMD updates. It seems like almost everyone now is running away from EMDs but it seems like to me, they are still ranking better than non-EMDs. They don't rank as well as they used to and that caused a lot of rankings to drop, but I still see that keywords in the domains and EMDs seem to have an advantage. I would be interested in talking to you more about what you're seeing.

I'd like to see the study without the YouTube video. We created a fake website and a really poor quality video and yet were able to dominate SERPS with ZERO backlinks aside from the nofollow in the video description. Search "internet marketing firm in irvine" to see the video and Enivri (Irvine backwards - see footer for Meetup attribution) both at the top of Google, both with zero links.

Hey Court,Great study. I wonder how this would change for a more competitive word. It doesn't seem anyone is actively trying to rank for "650 credit score". It would be interesting to crank up the volume of links and go after a harder term.This certainly shows quality, non-exact match anchor text works!-George

Thats a great experiment - Really nice.Google Sucks with New updates always - So we can not be stable with anything. This updates also makes some new experts like me. I really appreciate. But some how google also needs to intimate before they updates anything in SEO Industry.

I also wonder what would be the result without exact anchor text links.

Do you have the control over that site to change the exact anchor text links? Before trying a similar case study you can check what difference it will make to the current ranking if you modify that anchor texts. Just a thought :)

Hey iriyas! I like you're thinking. I don't have control over the site but I can probably get in touch with the site owner. That would DEFINITELY be an interesting experiment. Great idea, don't know why I hadn't thought of it.

Yes, I second this. I think what we are all trying to discover (Post Penguin) is if "exact match anchor text" is required at all. It would be a great test to have all links that are "non exact match" and see if it can still rank. I personally hope that it can, as I don't like "exact match anchor text" - It's worked for years but has always been too open to abuse.

Post Runner has the same Design as SERPbook - Do you own both? or is it just a template?Anyway, great post and i'm loving the anchor text suggestions, as well as keyword miss-matching, thanks for the post and i hope to see more from you!

For the most part, the comments on Moz are of a very good standard with relative and thought through opinions or insights. It tickles me to see there are still cowboys whooping about offsite tactics that were useful a few years ago, but are as likely to waste the time (and money - although not much #cheapskateSEO) of clients.

I won't name names, but fingers crossed they stick around on Moz and similarly good sites long enough to repair some of the damage done to the reputation of SEOs.

BTW, I'm no SEO pro, just a copywriter who reads whatever I can to boost my own business and it's thanks to people who contribute quality material that I have managed to avoid wasting a great deal of money.

You know, I actually think that it would have been a little easier with a keyword rich domain. When I first decided to do a case study, I bought 650creditscore.net and wanted to use it. Based on past experience I still could have used it as a test and would have known whether my anchor strategy worked or not. But, if I had used that domain people would have said it was just because of the domain. So, I changed it.

I know that people have seen EMDs slide down but I still think that they are better than not having EMDs, they're just worse off than they were before if that makes sense.

Using a keyword rich domain that isn't an EMD would be an interesting test though. Someone should try it out.

Most of my larger clients use their biz name .com's and not EMD or keyword domains at all, so I haven't paid much attention to the algo updates specially pertaining to EMD penalties - although I do here there are people who believe they lost rankings b/c hey were using an EMD. But, IMO there needs to be something else happening in conjunction with the presence of the EMD in order for Google to see it as an issue - for example too many exact match anchor text inbound links, internal links, etc. I can't see how simply having an EMD but doing everything else the "right way" can hurt you.

Interesting you think having a keyword in the domain may have helped. I agree, if the name appears to be the biz name and not just a keyword domain. For example: http://www.doctorcreditscore650.com/ (assuming the kw is "credit score 650") instead of http://www.creditscore650.com/or worse, http://www.credit-score-650.com/

Hey Shaun,I want to preface by saying that PostRunner is just a tool that can help you connect with people who have blogs. I just happened to use it to find sites to create guest posts for. What really matters is that the sites I guest posted on were credit related.I used 13 guest posts and each of them only had one link. They were of course guest posts on sites that already have links of their own and relevance for credit related keywords.Yes, I was only promoting the homepage in this case. I use similar methods to promote other URLs of my sites but in this case, it was a very isolated experiment for me. In the beginning, I actually just wanted to see if I could get the site to rank with one anchored link. But, I regretted it after it was over and now changed the exact-match anchored link to be generic. So far it's holding strong at #2 but I'm going to give it a few weeks to see if it holds.

I think there is too many external factors (a lot we probably have no idea about) to conclude that your links made your site rank, there's no other sites out their that's more relevant to 650 credit score.

That is all your site is about! SO yes it's no wonder you rank first for it because no one else is basing a site solely on this keyword.

Cool Post..I like the idea of you keywords analysis. Its seems its gives additional idea in my SEO campaign strategy.Thanks for the share. I just figure out how SEOmoz tool very important in Link building campaign.

I have been testing these too. From my own tests I see that, unless it's a really competitive keyword, partially matching or exact matching domains can still easily rank in top 10. I have cross referenced my own test results with keyword difficulty tool's analysis and I see that while 50% is considered highly competitive by the tool, it's not that competitive to stop a domain without any authority to rank in top 10 just because it's an exact match domain name.

Crumbs - i read it all but was baffled by most of it....i am new to SEO/LINKS etc so i am at the point of googling to see what simple references mean. I have no idea about panda's and penguins and maybe thats a good thing as a few people in the same industry as me are all tearing thier sites apart to change things. There is something to be said about ignorance being bliss ;-)

However being ignorant about what i need to do to get links is not bliss...and so the learning goes on ;-) i look forward to the day i read these and understand them lol.

Ok so in this case, I got ALL of the links by guest posting. That meant, I could control everything about the pages that I got links from. I wrote articles that were related to my keyword phrase. For example, I created a guest post that talked about how to take a score of 650 and improve it to an 800.

I obviously couldn't find a bunch of sites about 650 credit scores to post on, so I tried to find sites that covered credit or at least sites that covered finance and already had material on credit or credit scores.

I just had an argument with an SEO who claimed that having at least 30% of exact match anchored links is top priority for anyone who wants to rank... Nice to see true-to-life experiments with such interesting stats. Waiting for the second part!

There are a lot of SEOs in my area and I have met many of them in person. I find that unfortunately, most of them run a few years behind. I met one a few months ago who was still doing mass article submissions for his clients.

I think that getting anchored links still helps a LOT but you can also overdo it. When you do, things get shaky and you can start to have issues. So, I wanted to explore alternatives. :)

Just curious, and pardon if this has been asked already, but I'm assuming there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between backlinks and posts as some of those postrunner blogs allow more than one link. How many guest posts did you write?

I have no hard data but it seems like many of the keywords I use are being blended together and anchor text is playing a much less significant role. Also, most of my display results include my search words but in various locations throughout the page description and not in a straight line.

This is a valuable study. I’ve been doing my own research about it and still need to get more information. Also, I’ve been doing a lot of test using different keywords and keep on losing traffic while testing some sites. This case study would help me assess my previous works. Thanks for sharing!

Good case study we need a better keywords research to optimize our website but i wonder that you have not promoted for your main keyword but still you are in top of the table between how long you are still holding the first page of the Google but when i check your ranking you are in 2nd position really amazing case study

Oh come on guys....if you want a million non relevant links just publish a picture of a cute cat at a keyboard ! People want cute furry animals.......!

All I see is that typically, domain age and historical diverse aged links are still doing well......even with very thin content seperated out by canonical tags (and links that have disappeared seem to count too.)

If you modelled some of the oldest websites and their link profiles, that were so huge before SEO anyway, you would find a pretty good model to follow. Amazon, Ebay etc etc. Its all branded links and those following that, probably sites who had no idea what anchor text was, are gaining the benefit of branding/url links.Not all those big corps have relevancy, well yes forbes writing about ecommerce and linking would be but what about all the ecom carts using ebay links or ebay image links? Those sites arent relevant yes but theres 10 millions of links from sites not relevant to ecomerce. Diversity is a big Yes.......Its probably going to look unnatural if you have 1500 relevant links only. If you mess with anchor text, prepared to get burnt!

Take all the indicators you know about ranking, apply that to ebay link profile, look at the percentages....and try to copy it is my best guess.

Google is a total BS company which I will prove very shortly in a case study with some highly interesting link profiles backed by Google $$$. All of these updates are not to improve search. They have an agenda to promote the big corperations as they are all owned by the shareholders, namely banking organisations. Wake up and smell the roses.

Thanks Court for such a brilliant and comprehensive case study. I am into SEO for more than four years now but I keep trying to learn good things from experts like you and I keep doing my own experiments to check how Google reacts. Infact I have also set up my own blog now which is found here www.arankaheadseo.com and I will try to update it regularly.I had a question for you if you can please reply to this.I found certain sites ranking in the UK using exact match anchor texts (to everyone's surprise almost 95% links out of 75K links come from exact match and one thing to be noted 98% of those exact match anchor text links come from a no-follow referring domain). Still that site is doing well.On the other hand I keep reading about expert columns stating, we should not use exact match anchor texts. So how to go about this.Will the following bifurcation be fine?50% brand terms in anchor text25% white anchors like click here or visit the site25% exact match anchor textsPlease share your thoughts on this.

I can't help thinking that one of the key reasons your site is ranking is it's sheer simplicity, creating a fast page loading time and therefore being very transparent to Google crawlers. With a page load time 3 times faster than your nearest competitor, this is always going to be a benefit. I think there's a lesson there too! Maybe getting tied up in fancy and attractive design is not really the way forward, however - it's no good just getting traffic, if the page doesn't hold your attention and that traffic does not convert to click thru's. Interesting experiment btw. Thanks for sharing.

This shows the SEO has changed drastically we cannot play with Google and yes if you blog regularly with high quality articles then you will definitely rank, older days are gone you have to become authority in your niche to get good ranking in search results

Man this is a very powerful case study! I also like the idea and tool of Post Runner. Do you know of other white-hat-tools, that can help build around your content distro? I have seen a few services with guest posting out there. I feel the market needs a true content network to help sync and link up the right networks. Not only will this lead to better usability, it will direct consumers trying to solve pain-points. I also think the branding part is essential! Do another case study in the near future or revisit this post in six months.

The "links from highly relevant pages" is probably not the only cause you are ranked well. It could be the co-occurence factor too. I wish you reveal if there are some co-occurence in your links; that is the keyword "650 credit score" around the links.

Awesome study Court! Its got me motivated to make 2013 my year for getting my site ranked even higher. I just signed up for PostRunner and before I start writing articles, I have two questions. 1) Can you share links to the articles you created on the accepted blogs? I just want to see what you wrote and the specific anchor text you used. 2) Over what period of time did you create the 13 links/posts?Cheers!

This case study has really changed my whole perspective to SEO.I had a few questions. How long did you wait in between your guest posts?Also were these posts stuffed with the keyword (650 credit) or was it also once or twice?Also, was the link in close proximity to the keyword?

"I wish I had NOT used the main keyword in any of the links. Now I'm interested in designing a similar case study that doesn't use any exact-match anchored links. My thought process in using one was that this site doesn't have the necessary swag to get some on its own but now I'm wondering where the site would be ranked without that link."This is a very interesting idea for an alternate experiment. Something I'm also wondering about (and I apologize if this has already been asked) is how different the results would be if the main keyword had been used MORE in the links (or at least more uniformly).

Its a great idea to see how your real customers link to you. After the initial linkbuilding, hopefully you'll get some natural links coming out of the woodwork. Look at how people are linking to you and what terms people are using and put those into your own link building.

Oh Court. Just Awesome. I think I'm going to apply some major changes after reading this case study. Thank you so much for such an excellent case study. Waiting for your next writing on seo. Would you please share some link building strategies also in next writing? Or if you have already please let me know. I'm eager to read. Thanks a lot :-)

Great! I've been looking for a post like this. Do you think this can apply for local search? I have been focusing on obtaining links not necessarily from sites that are relevant to a product but geographically relevant. For example, if I sell bicycles in Austin and want to rank for the search query "Bicycle Shop Austin". Do you think it would help to obtain links from local Austin businesses that do not have anything to do with bicycles but are located in or all about Austin?

Yeah Derek if I was doing that I would be focusing on two things:1. Trying to get links from local businesses in that area, even if they weren't related.2. Trying to get links from other sites are are related to bicycles.I would stay away from stuffing anchors. Just work on building relevance. If you're guest posting somewhere, you want to say something like 'Derek's Bicycles is a shop that provides awesome bike gear to people in the Austin area. You can find there site here.' Link the 'here'.When you get links from local businesses, just let them use whatever anchors they want to use. That's how it should be done and it's a lot better that way.

Thanks Court for clearing all my doubts and miss conceptions about link building, I have already performed some of the irrelevant link building techniques for my website crediblelink.com, but from here on-wards i will only target relevant content and websites to get linked from.

So here is my first approach and this is to you would you mind giving a link to my website on your portal and help me in creating a good quality backlink from your website.

I'm going to be brutally honest with you yogeshpandey because I really would like to help you. No one is going to link to you just because you ask them to and if they do, that probably isn't a source you want to get a link from.

Figure out how to provide value to people. The first step is to create a site that serves a need and then maybe you can learn to write solid guest posts for sites that are similar in topic. Admittedly, my site isn't the greatest but I know how to provide value in my guest posts and for this case study, 13 site owners agreed with that statement.

Right now you basically just have a directory. Think about this: Do you think that there are people out there who would be stoked if they found it? If you can't answer that with yes, you have to start over and come up with an idea for a site that people will be stoked about. After you have that, ask yourself where the people who would be stoked hang out - what sites are they on? Those are sites that you want to try to guest post and interact on.

@Court - You have raised a very learning point here, linking to niche directories. But how to decide on the niche directories and second point is how many times you get a link from these directories.

There will be lot of cost associated or you might have to wait for months to get listed on these directories.My point here is for a new website who does not have any PR can target directories with PR more than 3 and easily get a link with in few weeks.This way they can very fast gain a good PR for their website. Most of the marketers don't rely on websites having no PR. So it is very important to gain some PR at the initial stage and later by you can work on quality link building strategies.

I have also launched a web directory a weeks back (http://www.crediblelink.com), however after reading the forum comments here i am bit confused on my link building strategies. I agree with the Court point of linking to niche directories but in such scenarios how long will it take to make this link more authentic by increasing its PR.

Getting PR is great, but not at the expense of relevance. Back in the day you could just list your site in a few thousand directories and it would work really well. But, honestly that's a much riskier strategy now, especially if those are the first links you get.

The first links you get REALLY need to be good ones. They need to be relevant and they need to be from legit sites. Most directories are going to have almost no authority for the keywords you want to rank for. Sure some of them will have some PR but will they have relevance? In most cases they won't. And, if those are the first links you get, you'll never get all of the traffic that you could get otherwise. There is a stalling effect that seems to happen. Sure, you can probably overcome it eventually if you get enough awesome links but why would you want to start in the hole?

I personally wouldn't even list my brand new site in niche directories right away. I would get a bunch of other types of links before I even considered it.

Wow, cannot wait to
see the impacts of the strategy that you have adopted. It is great that you
have used a wide variety of keywords and honestly speaking, I have been personally
doing this for the past couples of months, and seeing positive outcome.
However, I am using 20% exact matched anchor text compared to your 10%.

Cool I'm glad that you've seen a positive outcome from similar work. Not sure if you've seen any of my other comments in this thread but I'm really planning on getting more exact match anchors just to see what happens. I'm interested in seeing when things start to go downhill. I'm guessing that it will be way above 20% but we'll have to see.

Hey Prime85,I'm not running PostRunner anymore and no...I don't think they have the category list anywhere on the site. They should though. But, I would be happy to help and I obviously know what categories are in there. What niche are you in? If you're not comfortable listing it here, shoot me an email - I'm listed on my profile page.

That relevance tops number of links or EMAT for that matter is not only interesting to hear as a validation to recent theories, but encouraging as well :)Besides, this case study would probably point the speed at which the change in evaluating is being made (as time passes by it tends to rank stronger). It would be a perfect indicator of relevance and organic link building taking over old practices. On-site SEO looks OK too, but as you said it will be great to Panda proof the site with adding more content, though it is interesting to see such a small but relevant resource ranking high. In a way, it defends the purpose of SEO :)

Yeah I really need to improve the quality, look, and feel of the site. So far I've been waiting because I hoped that the case study made it to the main blog and I didn't want to compromise it before it did. Now I'll give it a week or so and after that, I'm pretty interested in shaking things up. I have big plans for expanding the case study. Thanks for your thoughts Slavko!!

Court, this was a very interesting case study. I love case studies because it gives people idea on what works and what doesn't work.I can see that the website is still ranked in the top 3 spots. Number 2 in my computer for the term 650 credit score.I would definitely agree with not using Exact match anchor text in your next case study.I remember one of my sites had never used the exact match as anchor text but is still ranking in the first page until today. Most of the links and anchor texts came from bare URL links.Would be interested if you could create a new case study about it as well. Let me know if you'd like to have others join you as well, I'd love to join and do a similar case study on this too.

Yep Ryan I'm super into case studies as well. Yep it's stuck for quite a while now. It took a while for SEO Moz to approve it and it's pretty much stuck at #2. It would be awesome if we could get a group of others to create similar case studies at the same time. I feel like the data would be more concrete if multiple people did at simultaneously. Would love to have you join.

I really think that it's the relevance that matters Linktub. If you look closely at the case study, there's only one anchored link. This case study developed authority for the keyword based on the relevance that was on the other sites.Based on what I'm seeing right now with my testing, getting a lot of anchored links causes problems. At best it slows down the progress and at worse, it stops it.

YouTube is definitely on my list of things I want to test out this year. We all know that the links are no-followed from YouTube but it seems like they still produce a positive benefit, based on what I've seen. But, I need to isolate it by using only YouTube links. I really need to figure that out!

Court, I think it's an interesting study. Lots of people are looking for that niche website to help build a business. I'm shocked that you aren't trying to get leads with the site, though. For the benefit of a case study, I can see the point, but with a little biz dev, you could find a partner to take leads for, 1.) credit score improvement help, 2.) loans for each of those audiences you're reaching. Just the way my brain works.My guess is that the quality of the site and the high bounce rate will cause it to suffer in rankings over time, so creating a good "free report" on "The 5 Quickest Ways to Improve Your Credit Score" or "The Top 10 Mortgage Lenders for 650 Credit Scores" is a sure fire way increase engagement and improve time-spent-on-site and increase your chances of maintaining that top tier ranking.

"My guess is that the quality of the site and the high bounce rate will cause it to suffer in rankings over time" - Yeah you're definitely right about that! And, those are great ideas for increasing engagement. I know how to improve credit well so I could create a free report easily. Thanks for your suggestions - I need to get on that ASAP.

Great case study. Like mentioned I would love to see what happens if you added lets say 10-20 or so low quality anchor links from sites that have no page rank for instance. It would help put to rest the fact that low quality links dont do ANY good whats so ever these days.

As well I would love to see where it would of ranked completely without any direct keyword anchors.

Last but not least, how would the rankings change with some social bookmarking and web 2.0 links?

That would be super interesting. You would basically be doubling up the links and adding tons of low quality keyword anchors to the profile. I'm definitely going to do this at some point. Yeah it would be interesting to see what would happen if it had some web 2.0/social bookmark links!I don't think that there's any question about whether it would be better off it people were sharing the site socially. That would definitely put it in a better place. But, in that industry I don't imagine there is a lot of Facebook/Twitter/Google+/Pinterest sharing going on.

It was a real pleasure to read the article. I like the idea and it came to you opportunely. Thanks a lot!

I see the reasons why you are regreting about that single youtube video but still I'm personally very glad that you've done it because if it was a part of optimization, which brought your web to the top, we have to analyze the question in details. Maybe exactly the youtube video made the half of the work.

Yeah the YouTube video might have helped which as you said, is the reason I'm regretting it. I am thinking right now that the next phase of the case study will involve getting rid of the YouTube video and the exact-match anchored link. It would just be interesting to see what would happen.

An interesting post, thanks. You could always try making an excellent YouTube clip. If I see a cheesy one then I don't think very highly of which business/site/whoever has made it. If it is a clever/funny one then I'm likely to follow it all up.

Also, I'm wondering what Google are going to call their next web cleansing mijigger. I'd love it if they called it Giraffe! SEOMOZ should run a poll.

I think a really interesting case study would be making many high quality YouTube videos. YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world and there's a lot of opportunity to drive traffic with it. But, what I'm interested in is measuring the SEO impact.I think they should call it Piranha. :)

Its really a great job! Anyway,keep in mind that even if your on-page optimization is "perfect" you'll have a harder time ranking for your keywords.Though Google doesn’t announce any numbers or percentages regarding on optimizing anchor text for backlinks,this is a good number or percentage as it looks more natural.

Nice case study. I'm glad there has been some work on this. It seems the panic around anchor text is somewhat over-exaggerated.

Hopefully the rumors of the upcoming "Balrog update" in 2013 aren't true: "It will be an algorithm that, wrapped in fire, will crawl the Web,
penalizing and incinerating sites which do not include the anchor text
"click here" at least seven times and not include a picture of a kitten
asleep in a basket." :-)

If you were able to rank a brand new domain in a competitive niche within a couple of months, then I can't help but to assume that the weight Google provides matured domains isn't as significant as I previously thought.

Hey dillinger! Well... every keyword is different and relatively speaking, this keyword really isn't that hard. I used to rank really high for 'internet marketing' and I know for a fact that I couldn't do the same thing with the phrase, on the same timeframe. It would take much much longer.

Domains with good history are still a LOT easier to get to rank well. But, if the keyword isn't too difficult, it's possible to rank well without the age.

1. Yes I only linked to the home page.2. I would love to see someone test that out. There's no question that it would pass relevance. But, it isn't going to be necessary if you get links from the right sites.

Hi Court - Interesting case study. I really appreciate seeing posts where people show you can rank well without a ton of exact match anchors - it can be hard to convince folks that you don't need the perfect anchor text.

Hey Geoff,I'm finding that having a lot of exact match anchors is causing a lot of trouble. Some sites have enough quality signals to be able to override the issues but others don't. So, some of feeling that more than others. But, I've seen it a lot with my students at the Academy. They got overly aggressive with anchors because it was working really well. Then, things started getting dicey after Penguin. It's much riskier now to use a lot of exact match anchored links and even other links that are keyword anchored without being exact-match.

This is a great case study man. No fluff, no BS, just straight up honest advice. Probably the most practable (and actionable) case study I've seen for a while. Glad to see this got promoted from YouMoz. Thanks so much for sharing dude.

Thanks for the post. I'd be interested to know if you're factoring in the effect of co-citation as well. This article, for instance, has several references to credit scores and how you restored your own credit, and you provide your site's URL even though you didn't include a link. Would that instance of co-citation on a relatively powerful domain affect your numbers? Keep us posted.

Hey Keith. It will be really interesting to see if a move happens because of that. It's been live on SEOmoz since January 3rd (in YOUmoz) and it hasn't moved up but that doesn't mean it isn't getting value from it. Plus now that this article is on the main blog, it's definitely going to have a lot more juice. I haven't changed anything so it's likely that if it moved up now, that could be why. I noticed earlier that this article is now appearing on the popular posts widget that should give it more 'juice'. We'll see if anything happens. :)

Great case! Thank you! But I have a question: if we look through the first page of SERP we can notice that your site the only one is presented there by main page. The other sites have internal pages. What do you think - how important is this fact when ranking is designed?I didn`t make a research but I suppose that the other sites have no external links directly to their page where 650 score credit is described or have few of them. It would be great if in the next case you try to use an internal page.P.S. Sorry for my broken English, I`m not native speaker. Hope you will understand what I meant. :)

Hey Andrey!I think your English is great. I understand exactly what you're asking me. Yeah it would be interesting to try it on an internal page just to see if it was any different. I don't think it would be. I have done hundreds of case studies like this one and I haven't seen an instance where movement that I can get on a home page can't be duplicated on an internal page.

Sure, it might not end up in exactly the same location but I've always thought that movement is what matters for my case studies. If you designed a similar one that was built around an internal page, I would be really surprised if you didn't see positive movement. And, if you didn't it would probably be because of another factor like history, or existing link structure, etc.

I do a lot of case studies on new sites because history and existing link structure doesn't come into play. I like to isolate.

I really enjoyed your case study! My firm and I have been worried about how these Google updates would affect us. We have been able to survive through the updates. However, we do need to better adapt to the changes. Your case study will be really useful to help revamp our strategy. Thanks for actually making site. Instead of just theorizing what might happen!

First of all, great case study. Real world application is always appreciated!I am now convinced we should be doing a case study with two sites that were "hit" negatively by Penguin. One based on your case study and another with "traditional" methods of recovery.I was brought in to help with two sites that were hit by Penguin and most of our time has been to remove bad links and not as heavily focused on getting new "non exact match" anchor text links. Of course we are building links too but I'm realizing now that we are really focused on the old "bad" ones. We've got the penalty removed now and we're still trying to "clean-up" the link profile but we haven't recovered as far as I wanted to be by now...Very interesting....

That's amazing. Just saw it on first page, 3rd position for the term 650 credit score. But the question here is, how long is it going to stay there? I've seen a lot of websites got to the first page right away and disappear in a few months. A lot of crappy sites.

We've been hearing for a while now that "relevancy is the new PR", and we've gotten some great results by applying similar tactics (in a less controlled manner). Thank you for taking the time to run this experiment and conclude these findings.

Court, is not true that Google went after these types of services like post runner? LFE, BLS, and many other services where you could post your articles and send links to your sites, these were all destroyed by Google and sites using them got penalized at some level. What would make postrunner different than those? is not too risky to use such services?Thank you

Very interesting study! Yes, I (like many others) would like to believe that "anchor text" links are completely dead, however, there are still quite a few influential SEOs who believe that they matter (if not abused). This study shows that they really aren't required. To be honest, I'd be interested in seeing a study where "no achor text links" are present at all. I think that would be a great test.

Incorrect. I'm sorry I have too many on-going studies showing that anchor text usage is not dead, but alive and well.What matters is that you're not using it as an island unto itself. It's important to have good solid content, new pages with content, social media interaction, good site user experience, among the other myriad of things that makes for a great site and online marketing strategy.

Yes, I admit that what I said was incorrect. I didn't mean that they "aren't required" but rather this test shows that there doesen't need to be a high percentage of them, as shown from the test results. Also, I appreciate that they still have an impact and that they are not dead at all. So, yes, I didn't mean to suggest that they are now redundant. That's why I'd be interested in a test without them to see how far the site goes in rankings.

Actually Nick I believe that your original statement that they aren't required IS correct. That means, you can build relevance without them. Do you absolutely need them to get ranked? No, there are other ways.

I get what Chris is saying though because it's easier to get ranked if you have some. Does that mean they're required? No.

@Chris: what you're saying isn't wrong. Would the whole thing work better with social media interaction, better content, and a better user experience? Of course it would. But, the more you can isolate the more you can learn.

Great case study Court. Love it. I just registered a blog this week at Postrunner and already have 9 posts submitted! Reviewing them, it seems the quality is lightyears ahead of what I get submitted through BLU and MBG. Might have to submit some content through Postrunner here in the near future.

I think it would have been a better case study if you didn't have the words in your domain name. Domain names have a huge ranking power and it most likely played a bigger role than the few links you got. I don't think this case study is entirely relevant because of that. It would have been nice to see a chart with rankings vs/ link acquisition and the anchor text of each link. IT wouldn't be hard to do and would bring a lot of value to the case study.Thanks,

Ok julien but here's the question. Do you think that the case study would be top 10 in Google without the links? Would just having 650 in the domain make it show up at #2?

I was never trying to test 'what it takes to get to #2'. What I'm trying to test is whether you can influence rankings without using many keyword-anchored links.

I don't think that there's any question that it wouldn't be ranked there without the links. If you want to prove otherwise, it would be easy to do. All you would have to do is buy a domain with 650 in it, set it up like I did, get it indexed, and wait for it to move up. I would be interested in seeing what would happen.

Nice case study Court. Real experiments are so much more beneficial than conjecture. Anchor text analysis gets more complex with EMD, not all of which have been penalized to date. I see EMDs rank for competitive phrases such as "Internet marketing services." Maybe higher quality (whatever that means?;-) EMD/partial match domains may trigger alternate paths in the algorithm. I agree with some of the previous comments that having 650 in your domain name, was likely a positive. Congrats on generating 134+ comments!

@Nick-j - I totally agree with the concept of doing link building with relevancy, however taking no efforts in performing link building is not a good idea.As per my belief go natural don't try to add unnecessary comments or your site link on any portal. It is always recommended to comment and give your site as reference link where it is useful for the readers, this way you will not only generate a good traffic to your site but also a credible back link for your website.I would still prefer to go with directory submission as the first step in performing link building, here you can specify your relevant category and place your website there. This is the best way of getting healthy amount of links for your site on a relevant directory portal.

Hey yogeshpandey,Thanks for your comment. My point of view on that is a little different from yours. I wouldn't recommend doing any directory submission at all and if you do, I would only do niche directories that are really relevant.

I definitely wouldn't do directory submissions as the first step. I would make sure to get the highest quality links you possibly can first. If you start with a bunch of weaker links, it can be hard to get out of the hole you create. I haven't seen this work out well.

Variation is always support for the exact phrase you used in title tag (the most important place for targeting keywords and meta description as well). If you are tricky and create some good links with the variation of exact phrase you want to target, so there is no doubt you will get a good positions in SERP for sure and in short time of period. Let me show you one example:

If you are targeting:

Web Application Development and you are using this keyword in title, description and in content as well.

Now you are creating link profile make sure your link profile should be like this if you want to get good results.

Web Development

Web Application

Application Development

Web Application Development

Brand Name (here you can use brand name for anchor text)

For targeting one keyword you can target five different keywords and in short time of period you will get good results for your primary keyword that is, Web Application Development.

This is something i learnt in past experiences. Let me correct if i am wrong some where.

Thanks for your comments. My perspective is actually a little different. I teach SEO to a group of people (over 500 people) who has been using variation like you're talking about for years. We've found together that this strategy is getting dicier by the day. Google is seeing it as manipulative as most of your links are anchored with keywords.

If you have a project that is getting a ton of quality, natural links it could provide a lot of benefit. But, if those are the only links you get, things will get choppy to say the least.

Yes right this is not only the thing we were looking for the link which gives you most positive impact is, in some blog or article your brand were discussed and the people show lot of engagement to that page.

Hi Court,While I sincerely applaud you for doing some sort of experiment with anchors post-penguin (too many posts with no data at ALL!), I just can't say I've really found this study all that helpful for my real-world projects (though others have - and that's great!).

I'm also a little disappointed with how abrasively you handled Chris Wyatt's commentary, so I'll offer up some of my own. What if a community if not for dissenters? Please don't see this as a personal attack - it isn't - just some constructive feedback:

Like Chris, I believe the foundation of your study is off. Not because of search volume (highly competitive phrases can be searched relatively little) but because I simply don't believe this term to be all that competitive.

WHY does this matter? Well, as you stated, it doesn't mean the entire study is moot, but it DOES create a problem. For links to be the deciding factor, the phrase should be sufficiently competitive such that other factors (like content alone) wouldn't push you over the top. If nobody else (or very few people) are directly optimizing for "650 credit score", then it makes perfect sense that a site with 650 in the domain and highly targeted content would place in the top 10.

It's the same reason a site directly targeting a phrase like "Buy Dalmations in Westminster" would rank well for that phrase, even if surrounding sites had far greater link counts and were also about buying dogs (related, but not directly targeting).

I can also say from experience that while the SEOMoz competition tool is a nifty metric, it is far from being an accurate one. The tool gets it wrong very, VERY often and should not be relied on over human observation. It's a finger in the air that should point to more research.

Secondly, this study would have been more meaningful had you delved into the relative link levels of your competition and analyzed other factors than links in a more charitable light. Again, my belief is that you ranked so well for this phrase because you were hyper-targeted to that phrase in your titles, your content and your domain - much more than competition.

In the case of the top ranking sites, you were going up against several Q&A sites (Yahoo answers, etc.), which, while the primary domain would have countless links, internal pages would have relatively few (if any). They rank on merit of their relevant content and leech from their overarching domains - but that's different than a site that is 100% targeted at those phrases with links pointing directly at it.

So it's not that your case study is worthless or totally unhelpful - and that's not what I'm trying to say. But it tells us very little: that highly targeted sites can rank for low to medium competition phrases using generic anchor text. against other sites who don't directly and aggressively optimize for them that have more overall DA.

What perhaps might be a better case study would be something that included:

1. Phrases of varying competition levels - even within the same niche (targeted on the same domain). This would be a better representation of reality.

2. At least one phrase where you are competing against other sites that ARE heavily using anchor text as a fair comparison.

Again, I applaud you for taking on something like this, I guess it's just a little half-baked for me.

Hey Vovia,Thanks for the feedback. It will help me to improve my case studies in the future. I have an honest question for you. Not being combative - I just want your opinion.Do you think this site would be #2 in Google right now without the links?

Hey Court - Let's step back for a minute (I fully intend to answer your question) and look at the premise of your case study:

"If sites that have over-optimized anchors lost traffic due to the update, it seems to make sense that sites can move up with relatively few (or without any) anchored links"

But what you've essentially asked there is "Can a website rank well without anchor text in links?" - which we all know (except that guy who claimed links don't matter at all - thanks for the laugh, I'd love to see objective evidence you have for that) to be true. After all, there are other things that make links valuable: the authority passed from site to site, the context that surrounds said link and so on.

But let's ignore that for a second and look at the scenario you created:

-> a hyper-targeted website focused on a single phrase

-> a keyword phrase that has low competition levels, where few competitors are directly optimizing for the phrase

-> A partial-match domain

-> competition consisting mostly of Q&A websites with high DA's but very few (if any) links pointed to the internal pages that rank

Now, frankly given that scenario, I'm completely unshocked that you ranked as well as you did. I would EXPECT in that situation that you would have achieved placement within the first three pages, given what you had done and who you were up against.

Now, the links you obtained - did they help you move up in the rankings? Well YES! But that's not revolutionary in the slightest, because we already know that anchor text isn't the only value added by a link. There's context and everything else involved.

So all that your test successfully showed us is that in low competition verticals, it's possible to use links to help boost your rankings against sites who have no active link building policy and relatively thin content surrounding the phrase.

Does this ever hold up in reality? Does any legitimate business target exactly one phrase and one phrase only, focusing all of their content around it? I'd certainly hope not. This is more so the kind of behaviour you'd expect from affiliate websites, not corporate websites or the websites of small businesses - the kind of websites most SEO's work on every day.

For this test to be meaningful, you should have tracked a myriad of phrases in a more competitive niche - and for good measure, you should have chosen a niche with players that already HAD used anchor text to a considerable degree. The results of THAT test would show if it's possible to infiltrate highly competitive niches with relatively new sites with relevant (but not hyper-focused) content against competitors actively trying to rank for the same thing.

You also should have tried to achieve content parody - that is, unlike this case study where your competitors don't focus all of their content on a single phrase - you'd target a niche and write similar content to what you'd expect a real, live business to publish.

THAT would have been more compelling, in my view. As it stands though, there's just nothing to take away from this case study that we don't already know:

Better still, why not do it in a public forum like Max Minzer's hangouts, and let others contribute to the conversation? Probably a fair amount of takeaway for others - it'd be a shame to confine the conversation. You can find me on Twitter at @cstechjoel

Thx for your comprehensive analysis. This one the best answer which I got in
this post.

My 2cent for you, we have never qualified content so far in this case study.

As I mentioned above that content should be informative including News Related,
Related Search, Relevant and we can get support from Google and
Ubersuggest.org/ and http://soolve.com it helps us lots to build the content on
our website and need to do contextual linkinking within your blog for
respective pages. For me wiki is the best example.

And I am surprised to see people have done top-down on his post.

Come on guys wake up and try to find out the real statics which helps for SEO
rankings.

Hey Vovia, It was great to chat with you yesterday. Seriously, I really appreciated the feedback. It made me realize that I did make some sweeping statements, especially in a few comments. I look forward to seeing you around.

Let me ask you a few questions. Did you set a baseline? This would be a period of time (a few weeks) where you did not do anything on the site and during a time when Google did not do any updates.

You said that after 53 days the site "popped up" for your primary kw phrase. What changes had you made to the page/site during those 53 days?

On my first test I got a #1 position out of 35,000,000+ sites with 1 link. My 2nd test was on a page that showed up in the mid 20's and close to 70 links later, had not moved. A specific phrase was used and SERPs closely monitored. No changes were made to the page and only relevant links were built. The only time a change was seen was a temporary position in the top 3 (for 9 days) which happened for both a couple of retweets of the article and G+1 votes.

I do not think links help at all. Google has told us that their link evaluating and cataloging system, PageRank, is not used to influence search results. Ancillary data supports this premise.

Hey Reg,Here are a few things that come to mind when I read about your results. Let me ask you a few questions. Were both of your tests performed with the same keyword phrase? Were they both tested on brand new sites?

If not, you can't really compare the two. Established sites have different histories, different ages, different levels of engagement and social interaction, and different link profiles.

Also, 1 link can be way better than 70 links. In fact, 1 link can be better than 1,000,000 links.

You asked what changes I made to the site in those 53 days. I didn't make any changes to the site itself after I originally set it up.

I have a feel for the number of links that are required to move up for keywords in difficulty level this case study was built around. I've been doing this for 8 years and you just kind of sense how it works.

Here's the problem Reg, there are some keywords out there where 70 awesomely relevant authoritative links wouldn't even scratch the surface of what would have to be done to get into the top 10.

Ok so you don't think links help at all. Basically what you're saying is that this site would be currently sitting at #2 in Google without any links?

To figure out your current situation, I would have to see a lot more about your test. I would want to see where you got the links from and what your anchors are. Mistakes with either of those two things could throw it all off.

For those suggesting Court "should have done this" need to do their own case studies and perhaps post them here for everyone to learn. It is easy to come up with arguments rather than doing some real testing.

If 200 of us do 1 case study each we could reverse engineer Google algo. That's a niche idea right there for you. Who wants to JV? ;)

I like your comprehensive argue. Yes any case study works once we come up with all facts. Half information is close to no-information.

Everyone is discussing penguin and panda updates, but I know the guy who is working only on to develop quality content. And their website is never affected by any update. And then this is only the way we can beat our competitor's. Getting ranked with keywords which we get from different tool will not enough. I had worked at the company, they were getting business with SEO Company India, Website design India. When I joined another company and start working on the same keyword and their website got in top 5. They are not getting the same traffic on same keywords even they beat in ranking my previous company.

So getting rank for specific targeted keyword will not enough. We will have to build qualified content in our website. And I am very surprised to see user behaviors are different for different websites in same niches. So everything works if we work as per user prospective.

Link Building and all off page activities are very important to create quality backlinks for your website. On-page and Off-page goes hand in hand and your website can not survive if any one activity is missing.Start with simple Directory submissions on website linke crediblelink.com, write some articles and submit it in Ezinearticles.com, participate in forum discussion, blog post and Q&A websites. Work on SEO part of your website, write Title, Description & Keywords. Make sure meta tags are framed as close as your website business and content.These activities will certainly help you to create more visibility more traffic and good PR over the time.

Hi Yogeshpandey. I think the point of this case study is that you don't need to do this sort of link building any more. The case study shows (and its what Google has been saying for a while) that the relevance of the links is more important that the quantity.If these tactics still work for you, then i would love to see a case study showing it. maybe the next one for you as a comparison Court?The message here is quality over quantity

Nick - my thoughts exactly. The relevance is what really matters. I've done case studies already using those tactics and it's much much harder to get anywhere with links from those sources.Yup - quality is what matters.